Links of Interest to Tax Resisters

The new U.S.
government policy of denying passports to people with large federal tax
debts is beginning to get more fundamental criticisms. Here’s Kevin D.
Williamson at National Review:

The U.S.
government is building the world’s largest debtors’ prison: the United
States.

The right to travel is — like the right to free speech, the right to be
free from unlawful search and seizure, and the right to petition the
government for redress of grievance — a basic civil right. Americans as
free people have a God-given right to come and go as they please,
irrespective of the preferences of any pissant bureaucrat in Washington.
Yes, we curtail people’s rights in certain circumstances — when they have
been charged with a crime and convicted after due process. Tax fraud is a
crime; having unpaid taxes is not.

According to a new study,
the “tax gap” — the difference between what the law says people owe and
what they actually cough up — has probably been vastly underestimated. This
is because the very wealthy evade taxes at a higher rate, and have more
access to more sophisticated tax evasion strategies, than the rest of us,
and the tax gap estimating methodologies don’t sufficiently take this into
account. This is more ammo for the “rich people don’t pay their fair share”
argument. The researchers concentrated on Scandinavia, and took advantage
of data revealed in the Panama Papers and related leaks. They found that
while on average 3% of personal taxes are evaded in Scandinavia, households
in the top 0.01% of net wealth evade taxes on about 25% of their income via
the use of offshore accounts.

Find Out More!

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.